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Arts and humanities in annular eclipse
John Guillory writes in Professing Criticism, a 2022 book, that literary criticism “originated millennia ago, achieved a maximal state of organization in the twentieth-century university, and now faces an uncertain future” (xv). He begins with a well-known story: nineteenth-century literary critics were self-trained journalists publishing in periodicals, while universities concentrated on philology–language instead of literature.…
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Blockage, re-routing, clearance
Did I ever tell you about the time I was on an AWP shuttle bus and a publicist’s assistant told me that my sacral chakra was blocked? We were chatting about reiki, so I’m clearly receptive to that kind of random conversational offering, but it’s pretty bold to diagnose a stranger. I instantly knew that…
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Women working
During a recent quick trip to Toronto–my spouse had conference funding so I tagged along–I did a lot of museum-going. Several days and a hellish Air Canada odyssey later, what stays with me most is an exhibit in the Art Gallery of Ontario. It paired two women impressionists: the famous Mary Cassatt with a Canadian…
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Incantations from the snow globe
I’m not living in a snow globe exactly–the precipitation in Virginia this April is rain and petals–but I came down with Covid a week ago so I have definitely been living behind glass. It wasn’t a severe case, and in fact I first mistook it for a sinus infection because the most unpleasant symptom was…
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Mycocosmic and plutonic
Big news arrived this week: Wednesday morning, I talked by phone with Jeffrey Levine, who told me that Diane Seuss had named my next poetry book, Mycocosmic, runner-up for the Dorset Prize, and they want to publish it with a $1000 honorarium, likely in winter 2025. I said yes. I’m still stunned. My adoration for…